Section 1

1. All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense
more than to the Intellectual.

Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of
them elect to abide by that order and, their life
throughout, make its
concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the
bitter of sense
are their good and evil; they feel they have done all if they live
along pursuing the one and barring the doors to the other. And those
of them that pretend to reasoning have adopted this as their
philosophy; they are like the heavier birds which have incorporated
much from the earth and are so weighted down that they
cannot fly high
for all the wings Nature has given them.

Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the
better in their soul urges them from the pleasant to the nobler, but
they are not of power to see the highest and so, in despair of any
surer ground, they fall back in virtue's name, upon those actions
and options of the lower from which they sought to escape.

But there is a third order- those godlike men who, in their
mightier power, in the keenness of their sight, have clear vision of
the splendour above and rise to it from among the cloud and fog of
earth and hold firmly to that other world, looking beyond all here,
delighted in the place of reality, their native land, like a man
returning after long wanderings to the pleasant ways of his own
country.